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Re: What to "cover"



Hugh

Your story about the continuing war in Japan after VE day
was interesting because I was in the middle of the dilema
at the time.

After being in the Germany war zones until VE day, my unit was rushed
back to the USA
with orders to be reassigned to Japan. While I was on furlough in New
York ,
the atom bombs dropped and Japan surrendered.
Happily, I never did go to Japan.

Herb


On Sat, 02 Dec 2000 14:58:15 -0500 Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>
writes:
Herb Gottlieb wrote, in response to my proposal about physics
teaching:

On Fri, 01 Dec 2000 15:12:22 -0500 Hugh Haskell
<hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>
wrote:
....... snip snip .....................
Once physics becomes an entrenched part of the curriculum
for all students, it will be possible for teachers at each level
to
know what to expect of their students and (this may be more
important than knowing what to expect) know what will be
expected of
their
students at the next level, as well as what now stuff will be
introduced then. This way, every teacher won't feel constrained
to
start at the beginning and to "cover" everything.
..............snip................... snip ...................

Before expanding the teaching of physics to all high school, middle
school and elementary school classes let us first make plans for
training
a sufficient number of qualified teachers to cover these additional
classes. At the present time more high school physics teachers
are
retiring than new ones who can take their places.
it has already been established that most elementary school
teachers are
terrified of the subject.

This is a problem, isn't it. Kind of a voluntary chicken-egg thing.
Who gets to be first? Students in programs where they have few
qualified teachers, or qualified teachers with no students to teach
because the program isn't in place? Just another of the myriad of
problems that will face whoever gets stuck with planning and
implementing this program.

It's kind of like the dilemma faced by the army general staff at the
end of WWII. We had the vast majority of our army in Europe, but we
had to plan for a possible invasion of Japan, so we had to figure
out
how to get those soldiers to the far East, and what to do with them
before the invasion, and at the same time, they realized that they
would have to demobilize a good fraction of the troops, because not
all of them would be needed. So do you get rid of your most battle
tested, and therefore probably your best troops, or do you get rid
of
the newbies because they won't have enough experience to handle this
new difficult assignment. Either way, they were in trouble, and the
ones who didn't get demobilized would almost certainly suffer from
seriously depressed morale, either because they would figure that
they had paid their dues or that all the people who might know what
to do would be gone. (Sorry for the only peripherally relevant
aside--this is the subject of an interesting history of the war in
the Pacific I am now reading.)

Hugh

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows
because they
have to..
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